At first blush, boxers Rosalia Calla and Robert Couzens, of the North Burnaby Boxing Club, seem like yin and yang.
She is like a humming bird. She is a five-foot-two, 33-year-old spark plug who laughs easily, seems to never stop moving and speaks as fast as she swings. Her weekly schedule includes working as a nutrition expert at a grocery store, coaching other boxers and training more than the average football team fits into a month.
Couzens, 22, works out just as much, but is five-foot-eleven, soft-spoken, serious, shy unless he is talking about boxing and speaks carefully, as if considering the importance of every word.
Despite their differences, the pair have a lot in common besides their shared club.
They are both experienced, accomplished boxers heading – along with three other fighters from their club – to the World Boxing Council (WBC) amateur Canadian championships, in Mississauga later this month.
Calla’s list of accomplishments in the ring include 2006 and 2009 B.C. Bronze Gloves Champion, 2007-2008 B.C. top female boxer of the year award, 2008 Tacoma Golden Gloves champion (first Canadian woman to win it) and five-time bronze medallist at the Boxing Canada Nationals, to name a few.
Calla, whose grandfather was a boxer back in his day, started boxing in 2004 as a way to cross-train with the goal of being a fitness model, but once she got started, she caught the boxing bug.
“I lost my first two matches back-to-back and everybody was like, ‘Oh maybe this isn’t the sport for you,’ and I was like, ‘Hell no, this is the sport for me. I am totally going to keep doing it,’” she said, with a hardy laugh.
She said boxing is a great sport for building confidence, something she lacked as a young girl who was sometimes bullied.
“Once I step through the ropes, that is it. It is like my alter ego steps in and I am the boss,” she said.
Her trainer is full of praise for the now veteran boxer. (According to Calla, most women box competitively until they are between 34 and 36 years old.)
“She’s busy and she thinks,” said Manuel Sobral, Calla’s trainer and a former Olympic welterweight (1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea). “She feints, she moves around instead of just staying in one spot all the time.”
More than anything, Sobral said, what makes Calla a great boxer is her tenacity.
“She sticks at it … and she works hard. You have to go through the good and the bad times,” he said.
Asked how she will do in the 115-pound category in Ontario, Sobral answered quickly, “She’ll win.”
In spite of her many years of dedication, training and personal achievements, surprisingly Calla said her proudest achievement came ringside, last year.
“A boxer I train by the name of Remy Lavoie won the Western Canadian Championships and was voted top male boxer of 2013,” she said. “It’s great to share the same enthusiasm I have for the sport [with] future athletes.”
Couzens was one of the younger athletes Calla gave her time and energy.
Calla was Couzens’ first sparring partner, when he first began boxing when he was 12 years old.
“Robert is like my little brother,” she said.
Couzens, a middleweight boxer, is as humble outside the ring as he is fierce in it. He works by day as a youth program worker for the City of Burnaby and studies criminology at Douglas College. (He said he isn’t sure what he wants to do once he graduates, but will keep working with youth.)
Born and raised in Burnaby, Couzens is a recent Golden Gloves Champion (August 2014), four-time WBC Canadian Super Middleweight Champion, and 2012 North
Burnaby Boxing Club light-heavyweight champion – and those are just his most recent accomplishments.
Even though he has enough victories to make the average person arrogant, Couzens isn’t taking anything for granted in his preparation for the Ontario bout where he will compete in the 160-pound category.
“The training style I am doing now is generally working on all the angles that I should be looking out for from all the players and just preparing for any style that I am going to encounter: big guys, small guys, fast, slower, counter-puncher, that kind of thing,” he said.
Couzens, a Burnaby North Secondary grad, started boxing 10 years ago, when his dad took him to a boxing club to encourage his pre-teen son to be more physical.
Couzens said he wasn’t sure he would like it, but after one session, like Calla, he was hooked.
“Since I started to now one thing that attracts me … is the glory of winning, it is really addicting,” he said. “The other factor [that attracts me] is learning new things. I don’t get frustrated easily, if I get something wrong I like to keep working and working at it, until I get it. There’s satisfaction that I have finally worked at something so hard that I learned how to do it, and I am good at it now.”
Couzens’ coach, and a former Romanian champion, Mihai Afloarei tells a story to illustrate the natural ability his student has in the ring. Six months ago, a friend of Afloarei, who knew little about boxing, came to the gym.
“Inside the ring were Robert and another boxer from our club, they were doing shadow boxing, when my friend saw Robert he asked me, ‘Who is that guy, Mihai, he is a good [boxer].’ Even though he is not a specialist, he recognized that Robert is very technical, very hard working and very dedicated,” said Afloarei.
“Robert is the most beautiful, technical guy in our gym.”
Afloarei said between now and the championship, Couzens will be training six days a week to prepare. His dream is that Couzens makes the Olympics one day.
Couzens isn’t sure that will ever happen, but knows no matter what the future holds, he will be in the ring.
“I will probably box as long as I can move,” he said. “It is just a lifestyle now.”
The World Boxing Council amateur Canadian championships, in Mississauga, run Oct. 15 to 18.
